Burmese Looking Glass : A Human Rights Activist on the Forbidden Frontier

An American artist recounts her experiences in Burma, describing the commandos and refugees, her founding of Project Maine, and her lobbying against U.S. government donations of Agent Orange chemicals to the Burmese dictatorship.

New Jersey-born Mirante moved to Thailand in 1982 to paint, but found herself visiting the Thai/Burmese border, where she became caught up in the rebel struggle against Burma's repressive government, the same government that has kept Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest since 1989. Mirante's chronicle of his six years as an adventurer and "human rights pirate"--ending before the recent upsurge of protest in Burma--contains lively descriptions and vivid anecdotes, but it never gains coherence; its endless references to names and reconstructed quotes suggest the meandering tone of an expanded journal. With her tattoo, taste for rock music and romance with a photojournalist from New Zealand, Mirante is an interesting character. She is also a brave one, surviving arrest twice in Thailand, taking temporary jobs back home to finance a human rights survey and launching a campaign against the Burmese government's use of a U.S.-supplied herbicide as chemical warfare. But her book would aid the "refined and noble people" of Burma more if she had shaped her adventures into a tighter narrative.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Don't bother to get this book for a human rights collection, for only one small segment deals with seeing fields sprayed with 2, 4-D. And since punk artist Mirante believes in direct discovery rather than scholarly investigation, don't expect any insights into cultural diversity either. Buy this book, if you must, for its descriptive travel account of Mirante's encounters in the 1980s with the Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Palaung, Shan, and Wa people along the Thai-Burma border. Armchair travelers can revel in her joys and hardships along the frontier, but others will question her conclusions. Observing drug trafficking, teak forest plunder, and massive corruption about her, Mirante decides that these problems result from Ne Win and the Burmese government. Surely they will not disappear with a change of government. The work abruptly ends with Mirante's second deportation from Thailand in 1988 and her inability ever to return. An optional purchase.
- Donald Clay Johnson, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., Minneapolis
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.